Don’t say: Sizwe Bantu is the Greatest African Writer of All Time.
‘Not very well thought of around here,’ adds Zimmerlie.
Don’t say: he lives around here. Surely you know him, honour him revere him, even just as a local writer?
Surely Bantu?
For this is Bantu territory. The hills you can see through the window are the hills pictured on the cover of Bantu’s third novel, Seven Invisible Selves.
But of course—and you should know this—people are blind to talent in their own backyard, and a prophet is never recognised in his own country.
An embarrassing unpleasantness hovers over you, like the smell of a gutted office and burnt rubber. Silence. The swallowing of thick Adam’s apples.
Zimmerlie claps his hands together to banish whatever bad spirits have entered the room. ‘Well, Timothy, Thami and I have some business to attend to with Admin regarding your appointment. Why don’t you stroll around campus and get a feel for it, and return in, say, half an hour?’
* * *
The idea of a quick campus tour is quashed the second you step out of the air-conditioned English Department. The air blasts your face like a furnace, and the sour humidity curdles your stomach. Have you forgotten so quickly where you are? The sun dazzles every reflective surface; you swear that the tar under your feet is melting. And there is not a soul out of doors. The air-conditioning units on every corner of every building roar; what must be cicadas compete from low grey bushes. It is not a place to be outside at midday.
And—an aside—why the colonisers named this the Dark Continent must have been some kind of joke. It is full of light everywhere, refracting off all surfaces. It is drenched in sunlight. And the land is green. Fertile. Fecund. Fruitful. The jacarandas here are really purple, not like the insipid pastels back in Victoria. And the poincianas are magnificent trees with blood-red dripping leaves.6
6 Footnotes are tiresome things, interrupting the reader’s ‘jouissance of the text’ (if any) and plunging his or her eyes down to the bottom of the page to read some unnecessary and distracting, often self-consciously arrogant ‘extra’ but vital information added by the author. Look at me, they (the words) shout, or worse, look at ME (the author). Even more annoying is when they spill onto the next page. Ironically those who argue for the use of footnotes are those who maintain that they (the footnotes, not the people) are there to avoid disruption of the flow of the main narrative. They are most common in academic works, where terms need to be explained, or outrageous claims need to be justified, or irate or confused readers need help. The idea is that they can be ignored. Ha! Just try to read past one of those little numbers, and you are distracted, the flow of your narrative jouissance is stopped in its tracks, and you have to see what it is that the author has deemed so important that you have to halt your reading and find the corresponding number at the bottom of the page. Thank god, you say, these are not end notes, or hyperlinks.
You pace the sparkling cinder-paths, determined to get a perspective on the place. Each building—science faculty, arts block, Admin, each lecture hall—has been magnificently designed. The Admin block even has turrets, towers and flying buttresses. The science block is a cool, modern green—enormous slabs of concrete and sweeping open stairs lead up to large sliding glass doors. But each window, each glass-fronted door, is obscured by an intricate brick breeze-block pattern, as if to stop people looking in or out.
You savour the idea: this is a university, a place of the mind, and more, it is an African university, twelve thousand kilometres away from everything you were not, and twelve thousand kilometres closer to someone you will become.
You reach a green park, neatly squared off and labelled ‘Freedom Square’, its benches slouching against shady trees around a perimeter of buildings, and decide that this is the centre, the focus of the campus, a good place to stop and get perspective on the place.
Beyond, you can see Bantu’s bumpy and hazy hills, huts and dust. Freedom Square—a place where no doubt some bloody history—demonstrations, water cannons, tear gas, police baton charges—occurred, where students, vanguards of the revolution, wrestled their freedom from the Apartheid regime. The Doors of Learning Shall be Open! You saw the grainy news clips on TV as a child—but today, the square is sterile, empty, barren. The struggle, it appears, is over.
A scraggly, fur-matted, mewing kitten presses against the metal leg of the bench. You bend down to pet it, but it scratches your beckoning hand and runs off into the grey-green bushes behind. You observe with cold horror that its eyes have been gouged out.
In the centre of the square, signs point in higgledy-piggledy directions to Bekezulu Hall, to the Sports Field, to LAAC (whatever LAAC is), to the Staff Tearoom, Student Services. But you are seduced by the one pointing to the library. The humming machines promise sweet cool air, and you are dripping with sweat. You push through the glass doors. Inside, a vast open-plan dome, like a church, opens out. Very air-conditioned.
The library is empty. No students anywhere. But staff librarians quietly shuffle behind glass-walled offices. One woman at the checkout counter looks up as you pass her desk. You meander through the corridors of books, and then sit at a catalogue computer. You type in ‘Sizwe Bantu’.
Search results show that this university has all Bantu’s major works, in hard copy and electronic form. The Great South African Novel (2006), AfriKan Metaphysics (2007), Seven Invisible Selves (2008), The Five AfriKan Senses (2009), The Cockroach Whisperer (2010), and Cokcraco and Other Stories (2011).
Whew.
But when you search for availability, all of them show up empty. Withdrawn. Unavailable. Missing.
i Yam the cockroach who everyone ignores.
i Yam the loud fart in the elevator everyone pretends did not happen.
i Yam the spot on the teenager’s nose just before her first date.
i Yam the disembodied obscenity scratched on the wall of the church.
– Sizwe Bantu, AfriKan Metaphysics (2007)7
7 The reader will recognise several plagiarised/sampled/intertextual references, this time to Zimbabwe writer Dambudzo Marechera’s poem ‘Identify the Identity Parade’ in Cemetery of Mind, ed. Flora Veit-Wild, (Harare: Baobab Books, 1992): ‘I am the loud fart all silently agree never happened’. The phrase ‘Disembodied obscenity’ is taken from Njabulo Ndebele’s story ‘Fools’ in Fools and Other Stories (Readers International, 1986). Words, Bantu is saying, are all borrowed, recycled, used up, and all we can do is rearrange them
* * *
‘Ah, Mr Turner.’
Mpofu hands you a document, stamped and signed. ‘As we arranged over the Skype interview, Admin are very agreeable to a twelve-month contract for starters. And as soon as our little problem is cleared up, we can advertise a permanent position. And if we play our cards right, you could get it.’
‘Thanks.’
